Look at reactions to Trump, Musk and Kamala and you can see that this is essentially about the personality disorders of the ruling class.
In the Poe short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether the narrator visits an insane asylum somewhere in France. The asylum is famed for a new method of dealing with the insane, which is called “the system of soothing”. This system is noted for the humanity of its approach and its departure from the confinement of lunatics, for its concern that they should not be mistreated in any way. Whilst kept under constant surveillance, the inmates of the asylum are free to roam where they please and do as they please. Their delusions are not challenged, but accommodated. One of the staff explains the system’s indulgence of the insane as the chief method of their cure:
“We contradicted no fancies which entered the brains of the mad. On the contrary, we not only indulged but encouraged them; and many of our most permanent cures have been thus effected….We have had men, for example, who fancied themselves chickens. The cure was, to insist upon the thing as a fact—to accuse the patient of stupidity in not not sufficiently perceiving it to be a fact—and thus to refuse him any other diet for a week than that which properly appertains to a chicken.”
Perhaps astute readers can sense where I am going with this? A system that purports to ‘Be Kind’, but indulges insanity? Let us make the comparison explicit.
In the UK in 2023 there were widespread reports claiming that a pupil was identifying as a cat and being indulged by the school in doing so. A video was uploaded to Tik Tok from a Year 8 class in Rye, Sussex, of a pupil discussion on gender and identity. Whilst the video did not show any pupil claiming to be a cat, it did show a pupil asserting that gender is binary and claims to the contrary are crazy in the same way that calling yourself a cat or a cow because you ‘identified’ with that is crazy.
Even debunking attempts by papers such as the Guardian were clear on the response from the teacher to what would once have been considered a common sense argument:
“A teacher is heard telling the student that their views “were despicable”, threatening to report them to a senior colleague and saying “if you don’t like it, you need to go to a different school.”
In other words while it could not be confirmed that a pupil was identifying as a cat, it was confirmed (even by those attempting to crush the story) that in a British school today saying someone identifying as a cat is crazy is described as being “despicable”, and effectively results in being bullied and threatened by a teacher for touching on these issues in what could be described as a bluntly realist manner.
Meanwhile the ‘debunking’ attempt also had to admit that a local headmistress at another school (Katharine Berbalsingh, the headteacher of Michaela community school) in the same area was stating that she had heard of several cases where pupils were identifying as animals or as bizarre identities such as “a gay male hologram”. Berbalsingh was interviewed by The Daily Telegraph on these cases.
In Australia the year before this British ‘crazy cat’ controversy, The Herald Sun reported that a schoolgirl was identifying as a cat in Melbourne, and again was being indulged by teachers to do so. AI summary of these and similar cases (which may itself be suspect but is based on searching all available reports) says this:
“…a teenage schoolgirl in Australia has identified as a cat and is allowed to exhibit feline behavior at her private school. The school’s approach is to support the student as long as her behavior does not disrupt the learning environment…The incident is part of a broader trend, with other schools in Australia and the US reporting similar cases of students identifying as animals, often referred to as “furries”…The school’s statement emphasizes its commitment to supporting students with unique needs and identities, while ensuring a distraction-free learning environment.”
Now we all know the limitations of AI, but the thing that ring true for me is the language given regarding the school’s statement. That “commitment to supporting students with unique needs” line is identical to a countless number of policy documents and teaching guidelines I encountered when I was briefly in the profession 20 years ago. It reads as they write, it sounds like it’s lifted from a real thing.
Oddly, the inhuman quality of the way modern pedagogy describes things, becomes the strongest argument that an AI sentence was created by a human being (albeit a brainwashed one).
That immediate absurdist self-contradiction, the hilarious juxtaposition of allowing a pupil to behave like a cat whilst asserting that doing so will also ensure a “distraction-free learning-environment” also seems very human, at least in terms of the delusional humans who now rule the world.
Primitive as AI is, it is learning fast, and it takes a real human being to talk so much like a humorless machine. AI is already a little bit better than that at pretending to be human. It’s only woke teachers who speak such lengthy chunks of bland, professional insanity. or any equivalent State or Corporate writer of real policy guidelines.
All of this is of course Poe’s “system of soothing” in practice.
It is what the western world did for real, when it decided that insane asylums were cruel Victorian torture chambers and never anything better than that, or when it decided thanks to Foucault and similar French thinkers that definitions of insanity were simply the powerful demonizing and controlling the powerless.
For Foucault and his ilk, ‘insanity’ did not refer to actual mental conditions that might need constraint, but simply to a white patriarchal system of oppression where anyone who threatened the moral codes of the ruling class would be pathologized and removed from society (to be fair, its true that several totalitarian regimes have done this, most notably the Soviets had a habit of deciding that dissidents were mentally ill, but the postmodern notion that ALL such judgements are merely brutal operations of power networks defending themselves is ITSELF an example of irrational thinking and itself influenced by Marxist ideology).
Here’s the kind of sensible social advice great French minds like Foucault, perceiving insanity as merely a label of oppression, end up asserting:
“One can and must make man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression.”
That’s helpful, isn’t it?
Poe’s ‘soothing system’ is in fact pretty close to the orthodoxy of modern approaches to mental illness, and especially close to the curious modern phenomenon whereby having a mental illness becomes a matter of pride and a thing to be boasted about as a marker of courage. Dealing with issues privately is now described as inherently dangerous, whilst public concern about bizarre and anti-social behavior which may be mental illness is described as a “social stigma” (as if its bizarre to be wary of people who are behaving erratically or acting irrationally).
‘Ending the stigma of mental illness’ has become celebrating mental illness, and some researchers begin to sound as if having traumatic experiences that inflict psychological damage is something we should encourage. Having a mental illness is a super power that makes you more intelligent and a better human being, and importantly, more politically progressive. A study in the Journal of Affective Disorders from 2021 described their results in this fashion:
“We found that stressful life events were significantly associated with openness to experience; that participants with a history of depression exhibited higher levels of openness; and that openness to experience was related to overall intelligence…”
Wow! So really horrible life experiences that lead to lifelong depression and anxiety disorders are actually great! By this logic, we should make sure that everyone suffers lots of horrible and negative experiences as often as possible…which might explain many of the policies ‘open-minded’ liberals enact.
They are going to make our lives so shitty that we all have the depression super power.
What is this openness to experience anyway, and is it really as good and intelligent as its being described as being here? It could definitely mean openness to radical new social ideas, which again one side of politics will interpret as automatically a good thing (but which the other side of politics may spot as being loaded with risks and dangers).
But is it really the case that the most intelligent people are open to trying everything, or does that actually describe the recklessly stupid amongst us? I feel pretty good about the innate dumb conservatism that has prevented me being open to very extreme sex fetishes or self-damaging acts like trying heroin and crack just to experience something new. I have a feeling these limits have helped me in life, rather than not.
And my natural instinct (now call me crazy for this) is to try to avoid really awful experiences if I can, and to want my children to avoid those really awful experiences too.
According to the newly inverted moral orthodoxy, AND the way social capital is now gained by having a mental illness or mental health issues of one kind or another, this common-sense risk aversion is now more pathological than thinking you are a cat.
Remember Poe saying “We contradicted no fancies which entered the brains of the mad. On the contrary, we not only indulged but encouraged them…”? Remember “The cure was, to insist upon the thing as a fact—to accuse the patient of stupidity in not sufficiently perceiving it to be a fact..”?
Here is IOC President Thomas Bach after his organisation awarded a gold Olympic medal to a man for beating up a woman:
“There is no scientifically solid method for determining whether an athlete is a man or a woman.”
Only, of course, there is. The scientifically solid method was applied by the IBA, which determined that Imane Khelif is a male with a rare condition, rather than a woman. Khelif was tested and found to have XY chromosomes. This finding matched photos of Khelif from Algeria dressed as a man and apparently living as a man, and matched the evidence of the senses when people without ideological brainwashing look at Imane Khelif.
Everything in objective reality and real science confirms that this athlete is a man. The conclusion reached by normal people using their eyes is the same as the conclusion reached by scientific tests to determine gender. And it’s the same as the conclusion reached by some of the female boxers forced to compete against this man.
Only ideological indoctrination (perversely, an ‘openness to new experience’ which is delusional experience) suggests that this athlete must be considered to be a woman.
And the more powerful institution, of course (the IOC) is the one which decided to support the delusion and “insist upon the thing as a fact.”
With so much insistence, indeed, that one of the world’s foremost biologists can be forced to climb down from asserting basic biological facts. A person with XY chromosomes is a man. Richard Dawkins knew this and shared a meme stating it. Imane Khelif threatened legal action for “harassment”. Dawkins deleted the social media post where he had expressed the scientific truth in the field that has been his particular area of expertise for decades.
So much for ‘respecting the science’ on gender. It is the delusion which demands respect and which is legally enforced today.
All this though, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Inanities like pretending there’s no ‘scientific’ way to tell the difference between a man and a woman are just the most obvious peak of the insanity by which everything is conducted today. The genital mutilation of children for profit which calls itself the protection of their gender identity is particularly obscene and foul given the innocence of those being harmed, but its reflective of a process which occurs in Poe’s story and which his narrator gradually comes to realize.
The ‘soothing system’, the narrator finds, has been abandoned. Now, inmates are confined. Inmates are restricted. Inmates are punished.
The narrator is surprised by this change. But he’s more surprised when he discovers the real reason for it, which is that the lunatics being treated with the ‘soothing system’ that encouraged their delusions then violently and bloodily took over the asylum. The people he has encountered as staff are the former inmates, still irreparably insane. The people he has encountered as patients are the original staff members, after the revolutionary overthrow.
It’s the short story which is the best ever expression of the phrase ‘the inmates are running the asylum’.
And its the story of our entire culture too.
In 2007 Gallup conducted a series of more than 4,000 interviews which found that Republicans had significantly better mental health than Democrats.
In 2013 the Buzzfeed leftist media organisation tried to debunk this finding by commissioning an extensive mental health poll of their own. Unfortunately for them, their own leftist poll likewise confirmed that Democrats suffered mental illness notably more than Republicans in almost every category. Overall, their findings indicated that Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to be mentally ill.
In 2020, yet another large scale survey, this time with more than 8,000 respondents, once again confirmed that “Those on the political left are significantly more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental illness”.
In 2020/2021, the Pew Research Center examined the same issue. Their findings were that a whopping 62% of people who described themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” had also been told by a doctor that they have a mental health condition (as compared with just 26% of conservatives).
Studies and surveys consistently return the same results-mental health is getting worse, not better, under the ‘soothing system’ of sympathy and encouragement, mental health is at its worst in those who vote for left-wing parties, mental health is worse for women than it is for men, and mental health issues are particularly associated with those who embrace very progressive or radical causes and those who claim to have unusual gender identities.
Even during COVID the people who were most severely affected in terms of their mental health were the people who most strongly supported the irrational measures that were supposed to protect them. Media led COVID scaremongering inflicted mental harm particularly on those who supported it. Democrat COVID fanatics victimized themselves (as well as everyone else).
When people on the Left are themselves asked to describe their mental health, they consistently cite more mental health problems and more interaction with mental health services than people on the Right do. Despite the drawbacks of polling and surveys, these are not results that are being manipulated, since they have been funded and conducted by both sides of the political aisle and each time reached the same conclusions.
It is not something being ascribed to them by their political enemies. It is something they describe about themselves. In the most recent of these surveys, 38% of people who described themselves as Marxists also confirmed they had diagnosed mental health issues. The patterns are clear and repeat every time, regardless of who is doing or funding the research.
In a highly illuminating article penned in 2023, Christopher F. Rufo argued that modern events in the United States in particular could be understood by reference to Cluster B personality disorders. Rufo points out that the psychopathologies of Cluster B personality disorders (the narcissist, the borderline, the histrionic and the antisocial) are now prevalent everywhere. That rather than being private issues dealt with in consultation with a psychiatrist, or shameful problems whose sufferers were “relegated to the fringes of society”, these pathologies ARE our society today. They are especially prevalent in our social and financial elite, and they are shaping our institutions and our culture.
The lunatics have made the whole of society their asylum, and the rest of us are trapped in their delusional vision. That is the underlying explanation of why so many of these people cannot be reasoned with, why they move to more and more totalitarian responses and more and more censorship and authoritarian control, and why they are so blind to the flaws and crimes of the things they support. We are talking about delusional people with power over rational people, disgusted by any rational rejection of their delusional policies and lashing out in response whenever either their power or their sanity is questioned.
In a recent post I described having once dated one of these people, and how her behavior pushed me away. I described a little of what it is like to date someone with a serious personality disorder (functionally hidden until you are in the intimacy of a relationship). My argument there was that if you look at how the Democrats have reacted to Trump and now to Elon Musk, if you look at how mainstream media applies a savage and delusional hatred to both men which personality disorder sufferers elsewhere adopt as their own feelings, what you see is exactly what you would see from a spurned Cluster B partner whose behavior has caused the rift but who can never know themselves enough to blame themselves for it.
We are essentially being ruled by a Cluster B elite of narcissists, hysterics, histrionic actors (de Niro types) and their lower level antisocial minions. These disorders are the standard psychological profile of those who are at the top of our system, and of those most likely to support them, from the Antifa street thug to the white female journalist to the corporate suit to the Silicon Valley billionaire. And especially of those delusional enough to suddenly decide that Kamala Harris is their mother goddess, and Tim Walz their father.
What should one make of the kind of people who post this:
“I said maybe
You’re gonna be the one that saves us
And after all
You’re our Wonder Walz.”
Together with a picture of a beaming Walz being hugged by children?
Or what should one make of the Cluster B who posts this:
“Tim Walz is my dad; Kamala’s my fun aunt who lives next door. They just found out I’m being bullied by the shittiest kid in my class, JD. When they try to talk to his dad, Don, it becomes clear he’s the real problem. They go back to their car; Kamala pulls out her cop badge, Tim grabs his old baseball bat. They walk to Don’s porch. As Tim reaches for the doorbell they look at each other and smile. This is going to be fun.”
That last, which manages to pack more disturbing delusion into five lines than Poe gets into his whole short story, was posted by a Democrat politician, a grown man of 34 who is a lawyer and served as the member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives for the 4th District between 2015 and 2019. And he fantasizes about being a bullied little boy and having his party leaders be his imaginary family which engages in horror movie ‘fun’ like killing the neighbors.
Their hatred of Trump or Musk or you is the hatred of the Cluster B ex with a kitchen knife in her hand screaming “How DARE you leave me!”. People like Aaron Regunberg, or the thousands of other Democrat account holders who were upset that Trump survived an assassination attempt, prove my point far better than my words can. Reading them is both darkly hilarious and pretty chilling.
But that crazed voice, that Cluster B outpouring of delusion and hate, is also the voice in which pretty much every mainstream news article now speaks. Insane hate at Trump or Musk, insane instant love at Kamala and Walz. Just check our how many Tim Walz is my dad fantasies were being pressed by mainstream media as soon as he was selected as Kamala’s VP running mate. Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, The Independent all echoed Regunberg’s delusion.
And that is so because what Poe described in fiction, has happened to us in reality:
“…one fine morning the keepers found themselves pinioned, hand and foot, and thrown into the cells, where they were attended, as if they were the lunatics, by the lunatics themselves who has assumed the offices of the keepers.”
We are not fighting a sane opponent. We are disputing the fate of the world with delusional lunatics acting out their Daddy fantasies.